Ida Sophia (b. 1989) is a Tarndanya/Adelaide-based performance artist with a hybrid media, sculpture and installation practice that draws on the body to render performative works in various materials. Beginning with personal narratives, Ida’s work is characterised by conceptual examinations of widely shared, uncomfortable human experiences such as hope, regret, familial tension and grief. Ultimately, the works construct a capacity to accept, understand and process pain within our faculty of reason, will and belief.

Through sound, scale, sensory elements, time and repetition, her immersive works seek to reach the viewer through an immediate bodily experience, influencing how ideas may be received. Ida’s long durational works invoke a sense of held space, not unlike sacred locations, and a fluid experience of time. Her theoretical framework is informed by Amelia Jones’s argument for representational pain in art as essential for us to consider our own and thus, how we must deal with it. Ida works with performance materials that transform, such as wax or flowers, and sculptural elements that heighten conceptually driven experiences of awe, tension and body-body transmission. Building space for pain to be witnessed via such material and sensory means, Ida asks it to speak back.

Ida’s current research is an investigation of performance relic ‘liveness’. Ida defines liveness as the active pre-planning, consideration and creation of an environment by the performance artist, which exists in an environment around a live performance in order to maintain its liveness. Through her 2022 Manifesto: ‘Liveness: A Manifesto for 21st Century Performance Artists’ and subsequent exhibition led enquiry in 2023, Ida is interested in developing artist-led strategies, such as linguistic shifts and unorthodox archiving/restaging methods, for how performance relics can maintain and exert their liveness to distant audiences, academics and archives.

Ida has exhibited in multiple shows locally and internationally including: The Art Gallery of South Australia (Tarndanya/Adelaide 2023), Seventh Gallery (Naarm/Melbourne) 2023, Live Dreams (Performance Space, Carriageworks) 2022, Adelaide Festival Centre 2022, South Australian Living Artist Festival (2019-22), The Venice International Performance Art Week: Dissenting Bodies Marking Time (2020), Sofia Art Week (Bulgaria, 2020), SALA (Adelaide, 2020), Æther (Bulgaria 2019), Collective Haunt Gallery Adelaide 2019, ACU Gallery Melbourne 2019, Head On Screens - Head On Photo Festival, Sydney 2019, Soft Power Palace at Kunstgebäude Stuttgart 2018.

Ida has developed her practice through rigorous training with The Marina Abramovic Institute (Greece, 2019), Guillermo Gomez Peña’s La Pocha Nostra troupe (Italy, 2020), PAS (Performance Art Studies) with BBB Johannes Deimling (Online, 2020) and Vest&Page’s Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy, 2020). Ida has been mentored by a range of performance artists and curators, among them Joseph Morgan Schofield (Artist/co-ordinator of the Live Art Development Agency, UK), Joshua Soafer (Artist, UK) Voin de Voin (Artist/Curator, Æther, Sofia) and Boris Kostadinov (Curator, Open Arts Foundation, Sofia). Conceptual development of her work has been facilitated at residencies including World Of CO (Sofia, Bulgaria) 2018, Dream Farm (Tasmania, Aus) 2021 and POP Gallery and Studios (Adelaide, Aus) 2021. In 2023 Ida won the Ramsay Art Prize for her durational-performance-for-video work ‘Witness’ (2022).

Ida teaches live art through in person workshops and online with the World of Co Artist Residency and mentors artists privately around the world. She lives and practices on Kaurna Land (Adelaide) and pays her respects to the Elders of this land past, present and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.

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